让大模型更可靠地问问题,通过证据和追问补全信息
InfoGatherer: Principled Information Seeking via Evidence Retrieval and Strategic Questioning
- 用证据网络和信念理论量化不确定性,融合文档与提问信息
- 在法律和医疗任务中准确率更高,且平均少1.5轮追问
- 适合高风险场景,提升决策可解释性与可信度
大语言模型在医疗分诊、法律辅助等高风险领域应用日益广泛,常以文档为基础的问答形式运行:用户输入描述,系统检索相关文档,再由模型生成答案。但初始查询常不完整,单次检索难以支撑可靠判断,导致错误且过度自信的回答。尽管后续追问可获取缺失信息,现有方法依赖模型内部模糊的置信度信号,难以明确判断尚缺什么、何信息关键、何时停止追问。我们提出 InfoGatherer 框架,从两类互补来源获取信息:检索到的领域文档和对用户的定向提问。该框架采用达姆斯特尔-谢弗信念分配,在结构化证据网络上建模不确定性,实现对不完整或矛盾证据的合理融合,避免过早得出确定结论。在法律与医疗任务中,InfoGatherer 显著优于强基线,同时减少约1.5次交互轮次。通过将不确定性基于形式化证据理论而非启发式模型信号,该框架推动了高可靠性关键领域中的可信赖、可解释决策支持。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLMs are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as medical triage and legal assistance, often as document-grounded QA systems in which a user provides a description, relevant sources are retrieved, and an LLM generates a prediction. In practice, initial user queries are often underspecified, and a single retrieval pass is insufficient for reliable decision-making, leading to incorrect and overly confident answers. While follow-up questioning can elicit missing information, existing methods typically depend on implicit, unstructured confidence signals from the LLM, making it difficult to determine what remains unknown, what information matters most, and when to stop asking questions. We propose InfoGatherer, a framework that gathers missing information from two complementary sources: retrieved domain documents and targeted follow-up questions to the user. InfoGatherer models uncertainty using Dempster-Shafer belief assignments over a structured evidential network, enabling principled fusion of incomplete and potentially contradictory evidence from both sources without prematurely collapsing to a definitive answer. Across legal and medical tasks, InfoGatherer outperforms strong baselines while requiring fewer turns. By grounding uncertainty in formal evidential theory rather than heuristic LLM signals, InfoGatherer moves towards trustworthy, interpretable decision support in domains where reliability is critical.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。